What is Excel?

Excel is a spreadsheet program in the Microsoft Office system. You can use Excel to create and format workbooks (a collection of spreadsheets) in order to analyze data and make more informed business decisions. Specifically, you can use Excel to track data, build models for analyzing data, write formulas to perform calculations on that data, pivot the data in numerous ways, and present data in a variety of professional looking charts.

Common scenarios for using Excel include:

Accounting You can use the powerful calculation features of Excel in many financial accounting statements—for example, a cash flow statement, income statement, or profit and loss statement.

Budgeting Whether your needs are personal or business related, you can create any type of budget in Excel—for example, a marketing budget plan, an event budget, or a retirement budget.

Billing and sales Excel is also useful for managing billing and sales data, and you can easily create the forms that you need—for example, sales invoices, packing slips, or purchase orders.

Reporting You can create various types of reports in Excel that reflect your data analysis or summarize your data—for example, reports that measure project performance, show variance between projected and actual results, or reports that you can use to forecast data.

Planning Excel is a great tool for creating professional plans or useful planners—for example, a weekly class plan, a marketing research plan, a year-end tax plan, or planners that help you organize weekly meals, parties, or vacations.

Tracking You can use Excel to keep track of data in a time sheet or list—for example, a time sheet for tracking work, or an inventory list that keeps track of equipment.

Using calendars Because of its grid-like workspace, Excel lends itself well to creating any type of calendar—for example, an academic calendar to keep track of activities during the school year, or a fiscal year calendar to track business events and milestones.

Find and apply a template

Excel 2010 allows you to apply built-in templates, to apply your own custom templates, and to search from a variety of templates on Office.com. Office.com provides a wide selection of popular Excel templates, including budgets.

To find a template in Excel 2010, do the following:

On the File tab, click New.

Under Available Templates, do one of the following:

To reuse a template that you’ve recently used, click Recent Templates, click the template that you want, and then click Create.

To use your own template that you already have installed, click My Templates, select the template that you want, and then click OK.

To find a template on Office.com, under Office.com Templates, click a template category, select the template that you want, and then click Download to download the template from Office.com to your computer.

Note You can also search for templates on Office.com from within Excel. In the Search Office.com for templates box, type one or more search terms, and then click the arrow button to search.

Format numbers

Select the cells that you want to format.

On the Home tab, in the Number group, click the Dialog Box Launcher next to Number (or just press CTRL+1).

In the Category list, click the format that you want to use, and then adjust settings, if necessary. For example, if you’re using the Currency format, you can select a different currency symbol, show more or fewer decimal places, or change the way negative numbers are displayed.

Filter your data

Select the data that you want to filter.

On the Data tab, in the Sort & Filter group, click Filter.

Click the arrow in the column header to display a list in which you can make filter choices.

To select by values, in the list, clear the (Select All) check box. This removes the check marks from all the check boxes. Then, select only the values you want to see, and click OK to see the results.

Sort your data

Select a range of data, such as A1:L5 (multiple rows and columns) or C1:C80 (a single column). The range can include titles that you created to identify columns or rows.

Select a single cell in the column on which you want to sort.

Click to perform an ascending sort (A to Z or smallest number to largest).

Click to perform a descending sort (Z to A or largest number to smallest).

To sort by specific criteria, do the following:

Select a single cell anywhere in the range that you want to sort.

On the Data tab, in the Sort & Filter group, click Sort.

The Sort dialog box appears.

In the Sort by list, select the first column on which you want to sort.

In the Sort On list, select either Values, Cell Color, Font Color, or Cell Icon.

In the Order list, select the order that you want to apply to the sort operation — alphabetically or numerically ascending or descending (that is, A to Z or Z to A for text or lower to higher or higher to lower for numbers).